When unboxing the Ouya, I was greeted by five not-so-subtle words—"and so begins the revolution"—printed on a red-tinted, transparent sheet of plastic. Over the next couple of days, I navigated the system, tinkered with some of its games and emulators, and tried (and failed) to load a few outside apps—all the while wondering, what revolution are they talking about, exactly?

The Console

At first, I thought they were referring to the console itself. On July 20, 2012, when the Ouya team unveiled the system on Kickstarter, they boasted that Ouya was "A New Kind of Video Game Console." The small-console-that-could reached almost 1000 percent of its target goal. With so many impassioned backers behind it, Ouya looked like a promising and cheap alternative for console gaming.